The Cartel (67 page)

Reluctantly, he tells the driver that they’re going to Valverde. The driver is just as reluctant to go.

“See the car behind us?” Keller says. “Marines. FES. Now drive to Valverde.”

They get settled in her house.

Keller becomes her nurse, cook, rehab coach, and bodyguard, although shifts of FES stay outside the house. He cleans up after her, makes her the plain food that the doctors say that she can eat, and helps her wean herself off the pain pills.

She’s in near-constant pain, and the doctors have said that it will be a matter of “management,” not full recovery. But slowly, she gets out of bed, she learns to walk on crutches, then with a cane. The first day that she can walk out into her little garden and back on her own feels like a victory, and she’s delighted.

Keller is bitterly amused that the Zetas, blamed now in most of the press for the attack, deny it and launch a public relations campaign of their own. They throw a “Day of the Children” party in a city soccer stadium with bands, clowns, bouncy castles, and hundreds of expensive gifts. A banner hung from the roof reads
PRESENTS ARE NOT ENOUGH. PARENTS SHOULD LOVE THEIR CHILDREN
—
THE
“
EXECUTIONER
”
OCHOA AND THE Z COMPANY
.

They throw a Mother’s Day party in Ciudad Victoria, give away refrigerators and washing machines, and hang banners that read
WE LOVE AND RESPECT WOMEN
—
FORTY AND THE EXECUTIONER
.

And their own tame journalists have started to write stories that La Médica Hermosa was in a drunk-driving accident after a party, and that her wounds have been exaggerated by her journalist friends.

Two weeks after that, Marisol announces to Keller that she’s ready to go back to work.

“What?” he asks.

“Back to work.”

“In the clinic.”

“In the clinic and the mayor’s office,” Marisol says.

“That’s insane.”

“Be that as it may.”

“They almost killed you,” Keller says. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Then I shouldn’t waste the gift I was given, should I?”

“Is this just ego?” Keller asks. “Or a martyr complex?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“You’re not Joan of Arc,” Keller says.

“And you’re not my boss,” she answers.

He can’t dissuade her. That night in bed she asks him, “Arturo? Can you love me like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can understand how you might not,” she says. “The scars, my stomach, the hideous bag. The limp. I’m not the same woman you fell in love with. You’ve been wonderful and loyal and faithful, and now I will understand if you want to leave.”

He touches her cheek. “You’re beautiful.”

“Have the decency not to lie to me.”

“You want the truth?”

“Please.”

“I don’t want to live without you.”

Two days later she makes him help her into her nicest clothes. She spends extra time with her hair and fixes her makeup impeccably. The effect is stunning. In a little black dress—sexy, powerful—she looks beautiful, even with the cane and the limp.

Then she goes off to give a press conference. For all the cameras, she unzips the dress and raises her arm to display her wounds. She exposes the jagged, still-red scars under her arm and on the side of her breast, the livid wound on her stomach.

“I wanted to show you,” she says, “my wounded, mutilated, ‘humiliated’ body because I am not ashamed of it, because it is the living testimony that I am a whole and strong woman, who, despite my physical and mental wounds, continues standing.”

Marisol pulls the dress back up and goes on: “To those who did this to me, to those who murdered my sisters, know that you have lost. I, and other brave women, will not let their sacrifice be in vain. Others have already stepped up to take their place. If you kill me, others will step up to take my place. You will never defeat us.”

Then she announces that she is going to the office to go back to work, and that everyone knows where to find her.

Keller watches her limp away, with Erika right beside her, down the dusty street, past the broken buildings, through this village of ghosts.

He thinks it might be the bravest thing he’s ever seen in his life.

2

What Is It That You Want from Us?

Shut up! We can’t hear the mimes!

—Jacques Prévert

Les Enfants du Paradis

Ciudad Juárez

December 31, 2009

Pablo wearily responds to yet another
“Motivo 59.”

It’s almost midnight, and this one is way out in Villas de Salvárcar, a close-knit working-class subdivision squeezed between some factories in the southeast part of the city. A lot of the houses are empty now as workers left the neighborhood with the maquiladoras.

It’s cold, and the heater in Pablo’s
fronterizo
is for shit, so he shivers as he drives out to Villa del Portal Street, one of the two ways into Salvárcar. He’s tired, and was hoping for this Saturday night off. There had been fourteen bodies yesterday, more than he could cover, and he’d driven back and forth across the city to report on as many as he could, even though bodies were no longer news.

It would be news if there
weren’t
bodies.

The scanner hadn’t indicated whether it was a man or a woman, or how many—just that there had been a murder. Pablo pulls up to 3010 Villa del Portal expecting the same old non-news.

The street is full of people—some screaming, some crying, others holding each other in consolation. There are a lot of other reporters and photographers—even television news trucks.

Something major has happened at 3010 Villa del Portal.

Ambulances pull up behind Pablo, along with a car full of
federales,
and the people start shouting obscenities at them.
It’s been forty minutes! Where have you been?! Cowards!
Pendejos!

Pablo gets out and slips on some blood on the sidewalk. He finds Giorgio shooting from outside the house.

“What happened?” Pablo asked.

“Some local teenagers were having a birthday party in the vacant house,” Giorgio answers. “Apparently, carloads of gunmen pulled up, went in, and started shooting. Some of the kids ran next door but the
sicarios
chased them down there. The people were calling for help, but no one came.”

Pablo remembers that there’s a hospital two minutes away.

“The shooters got back in their cars and drove off,” Giorgio says. “Then, of course, the
federales
came.”

“How many dead?” Pablo asks.

Giorgio shrugs.

It turns out to be fifteen.

Four adults and eleven kids.

Fifteen more wounded.

Over the next two days, Pablo gets more of the story. The kids were just having a party, with the knowledge of their parents and even the permission of the people who owned the vacant house.

The
sicarios
came in. Survivors heard orders to “kill them all.” Most died in the living room, their bodies piled in a clump. Others jumped out the window and ran next door, where the gunmen tracked them down.

It was over within fifteen minutes.

The question is, who did it?

And why?

—

Pablo tracks Ramón down in a Galeana bar.

The Los Azteca lieutenant is slumped in a booth, very drunk, and he stares up through red eyes as Pablo slides into the booth.

“What you want,
’mano
?”

“Villas del Salvárcar.”

“Go to hell.”

“We’re all pretty much living in it, aren’t we?” Pablo asks. He sets his glass down on the table. “The fuck happened, Ramón? Who did it?”

Ramón shakes his head. “You want to die, Pablo? Because I don’t. I mean, I do, but I got kids, you know?”

“Gente Nueva? La Línea?”

Ramón looks around, leans in, and then says, “It was a mistake,
’mano.
They had the wrong information.”

“Who did?”

Ramón taps his own chest. “Us. Los Aztecas.”

“Jesus, were you—”

“No,
’mano.
I’m going to hell, but not for that.” His head slumps, then he recovers, looks up, and says, “Some others. They had orders. They were told it was an AA party.”

“Like the rehab?”

“
Nooooo,
like AA, like Aristos Asesinos,” Ramón says. “The gang that fights for Barrera. They thought those kids were AA.”

“They weren’t.”

“Know that
now,
” Ramón says.

“Who gave the order?”

Ramón shrugs. “Who the fuck knows? No one’s in charge anymore. No one knows…anything. Someone above you tells you to kill someone, you kill someone. You don’t know why, you don’t know for who. Then the guy above you is dead, and it’s someone else.”

“Was it Fuentes?”

“That pussy bitch?” Ramón asks. “He’s gone. He ran away. He don’t care no more. Fuck,
I
don’t care no more. Nobody cares about shit no more.”

Ramón starts to cry. Then he says, “You better get out of here, ’Blo. Isn’t safe. They’re killing us all, man
.
La Línea, Los Aztecas, they’re killing us all.”

“Who is?”

“The Gente Nueva,” Ramón says. “They’re the New People, right?”

Pablo tosses back his drink and slides out of the booth.

“Hey, come to the house sometime,” Ramón says. “We’ll have a beer, watch some
fútbol.
”

“We’ll do that.”

Pablo walks out of the bar.

—

The next day, Pablo is in the city room with Ana and Óscar when the president gives a press conference from Switzerland to comment on the Villas de Salvárcar massacre.

“The most probable hypothesis,” Calderón said, “is that the attacks were related to the rivalry between drug organizations, and that the youths had some sort of link to the cartels.”

“Did he really just say that?” Ana asks.

“He did,” Óscar answers. “We run it.”

Calderón’s statement infuriates Juárez and thousands of other Mexican citizens across the country. Calls for his resignation come from every quarter, not the least of which from the families of those killed.

Óscar Herrera writes a scathing editorial, demanding that the president step down.

The president and members of his cabinet come to visit the families, apologize, offer their condolences, and announce over $260 million in new social programs for the city.

It does little good.

It certainly does little to mollify the Juarenses.

The day after Calderón’s visit, a
narcomanta
is hung up over a major Juárez street. It reads
THIS IS FOR CITIZENS SO THAT THEY KNOW THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PROTECTS ADÁN BARRERA, WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MASSACRE OF INNOCENT PEOPLE…ADÁN BARRERA IS PROTECTED BY
PAN
SINCE THEY SET HIM FREE. THE DEAL IS STILL IN PLACE TODAY. WHY DO THEY MASSACRE INNOCENT PEOPLE? WHY DO THEY NOT FIGHT WITH US FACE-TO-FACE? WHAT IS THEIR MENTALITY? WE INVITE THE GOVERNMENT TO FIGHT ALL THE CARTELS.

The next day, hundreds gather at the base of the Free Bridge to protest drug violence.

Villas de Salvárcar comes to symbolize opposition to the government’s war on drugs, a symbol of confusion and futility.

It’s a watershed moment in the war on drugs.

Another follows in short order.

La Tuna, Sinaloa

February 2010

The CDG and the Zetas have split.

The war is on.

The deck of cartel alliances is going to be shuffled again.

Adán knew that it couldn’t last—that eventually the Zeta servants would turn on their CDG masters—but he can’t believe it would happen this soon and in such a spectacular fashion.

He goes down to the kitchen to make some breakfast. It’s become one of his small pleasures—he likes the solitude of early morning and the simplicity of cooking an egg and making his own coffee.

It’s good, quiet time to think before a day of incessant demands.

Adán heats some canola oil and cracks a single egg into the pan. He’s picked up a few pounds and his last physical revealed that his cholesterol was a little high, so he’s cut his morning eggs in half. Watching the egg crackle, he thinks about Gordo Contreras, the putative head of the CDG.

Gordo made a serious mistake.

Some of his people in Reynosa kidnapped and then killed a high-ranked Zeta, a close friend of Forty’s.

Forty was outraged and gave Gordo a week to turn over the killers.

Gordo was in a tough spot. If he turned his own people over, he was done as boss of the CDG and became Forty’s bitch; if he didn’t, he was at war with the Zetas. Gordo has his own armed force, Los Escorpiones, but they’re not a match for the Zetas.

Adán takes a spatula and slides the egg onto his plate. He shakes some Tabasco sauce on it in place of the salt that Eva won’t let him have, then sits down to eat.

Gordo didn’t turn over the killers.

As a result, Forty kidnapped sixteen CDG
sicarios
and tortured them to death in a basement.

Adán places a private bet with himself to see who will call him first. It would be a smart move for the Zetas to offer to withdraw from Juárez in exchange for his help against the CDG.

But Ochoa and the Zetas are doing stupid things lately.

They’ve changed.

Their original cadre of veteran special forces has been depleted by arrests and attrition and now they have to recruit men with little or no experience and train them. Some of the people running around calling themselves “Zetas” aren’t part of the organization at all, and “Zeta” has become something of a brand name, like “Al Qaeda.”

Adán wonders if Ochoa is deteriorating as well. The decision to kill that marine’s family after the funeral was so phenomenally stupid as to boggle the mind. The public reacted with predictable outrage, and the marine special forces, the FES, have launched the predictable vendetta and are pounding the Zetas.

With the help of North American intelligence.